No One Woke Up Wanting a Horizontal AI Platform
The path to platform is paved with painfully specific use cases. Focus isn’t a limitation - it’s your fastest path to leverage
I had a conversation this week that brought back a familiar pattern - especially with the most technically gifted founders: They build powerful technology… and then struggle to sell it.
Not because they lack ambition. But because they confuse broad capability with market leverage. They build elegant, extensible platforms designed to do many things. And then hesitate to narrow in on one use case, fearing it would “underutilize” their technology.
But here's the paradox: In the early days, the broader your platform, the harder it is to move. 🪨
Customers don’t want to buy technology. They want to buy a solution to their very specific, very annoying problem. Preferably one that doesn’t involve them thinking too hard.
If your go-to-market strategy requires the customer to (a) understand their own workflow, (b) imagine a better version of it, and (c) map your ambiguous platform to that imagined workflow… well, that’s a lot of cognitive load for someone just trying to hit their Q2 OKRs. You have to sell outcomes, not infra.
What founders often miss is that focus isn’t a constraint - it’s a forcing function. It sharpens the product, tightens the feedback loop, and accelerates distribution.
The companies that break out - the ones that become verbs, categories, defaults - they all start the same way: with a sharp point of entry. Slack? Team chat. Zoom? Video conferencing. Wiz? Cloud security. Figma? Design tool. Even if they’ve grown far beyond that, the origin story sticks. And so does the brand. One clear use case, one buyer, one line of messaging.
The uncomfortable truth is: Technical teams often want the product to speak for itself. But markets are noisy and buyers are busy. Clarity is the unlock.
So if your pitch still starts with “we’re a horizontal AI platform”… It might be time to ask: 👉 What’s the one painful, valuable, obvious problem we solve better than anyone else?
Start there. Repeatability precedes scalability. The path to becoming a category-defining platform is to solve one narrow problem, at scale, for a long time.